“The Weekend”
Steve Wariner
Written by Beckie Foster and Bill LaBounty
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
July 3, 1987
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
July 25, 1987
The comeuppance of a cad makes for Steve Wariner’s best chart topper yet.
On “The Weekend,” our protagonist has the script flipped on him. He is used to being the heartbreaker, but over the course of one weekend, he falls hard for a woman who turns the tables and uses him for a fun tryst.
His delivery is perfect, with little tinges of heartbreak mixed into a mostly stoic realization that he’s getting what he deserves. You can feel him longing for it to be something more in the verses, and each chorus pulls the rug back out from under him: “You had some fun for the weekend, but I’ll be in love for the rest of my life.”
Karma’s got him by the tail, and boy, does it hurt so good.
“The Weekend” gets an A.
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In my last Steve Wariner review, I teased that he had a handful of country classics amidst a range of relative mediocrities. Boy, did he have a classic on his hands with this one, which in its understated way foreshadowed the lyrical hook of “The Dance” a few years later. The lyrics would have sold this song even with an uninspired melody, but the arrangement coupled with Wariner’s highly believable vocal performance makes me feel this one in my bones. The story is quite relatable as well. Perhaps at one stage of my life I was a bit of a “cad” but I still got emotionally attached more quickly and more easily than I’d have admitted, so there are a few girls whose absence I lamented similar to the narrator, albeit with less dramatic flair than “I fell in love for the rest of my life”. I go back and forth among three songs being my favorite from Wariner, but this song is definitely in the running.
Grade: A
Wariner really is working hard to claimed this sonic corner of ’80s’ country music as his own. no? I guess Dan Seals and Michael Johnson have recently demonstrated they were his closest competition.
The sound and spirit of Wariner’s song are gentle. The production is light. The vocals are restrained. The lyrics are strong.
The emotional consequences consequences of the narrator’s weekend do all the heavy lifting as we don’t have many actual details about what the weekend held for the couple beyond the water and the moonlight.
It’s all suggestive sensual sensory observations from the sight, sounds, smells, touch and taste of having fallen in love despite knowing better.